On Monday morning Lucy was unable to dodge the job of typing in the police and fire log. The log was extremely popular with readers, which Lucy found puzzling since it was nothing more than a chronological listing of calls to the police and fire stations for the previous week. It included items such as “Barking dog, Sycamore Lane, 10:27 p.m. Monday” and “Difficulty breathing, Shore Road, 7:12 a.m. Wednesday.” All names were deleted and only the most basic details were given, so Lucy was forced to conclude that the faithful readers spent the week puzzling over the cryptic notations trying to figure out who the barking dog belonged to. Okay, that was easy, the only dog on Sycamore Lane was a pit bull belonging to Tim Rogers, a former star of the Tinker’s Cove High School baseball team who didn’t hold a job but nevertheless was never short of cash. The more interesting question was which of his neighbors got up the nerve to call and complain, since Tim had a hot temper. Then again, she decided, maybe the readers saw it as a challenge, just like her parents used to approach the crossword puzzle in the Sunday New York Times. Some weeks, it took them well into Wednesday before they finished it.

Today, however, as she worked her way through the notations she noticed numerous calls reporting a vagrant. The first call was on the day before Mimi’s funeral, from someone on Parallel Street. Parallel Street ran behind Main and offered a back way into several parking areas including that of Marzetti’s IGA grocery store. This was followed by a call on Wednesday morning from Church Street and another later in the day from Blueberry Pond Road.

With a growing sense of excitement Lucy unfolded the Chamber of Commerce map of Tinker’s Cove and began tracing the various sightings of the vagrant, who she was now convinced was the homeless man. But when she finished she realized she hadn’t actually learned that much. She’d already discovered his camp in the woods between Prudence Path and Blueberry Pond so the fact that he’d been spotted several times in that area was no surprise and neither were the numerous sightings in the supermarket parking lot, where he apparently scrounged for food in the Dumpster. He seemed to spend most of his daytime hours on the move, popping up everywhere from the harbor to construction sites around town, even occasionally in the vicinity of the high school.